by Piers Torday
PART 6: GOODBYE, PREMIUM
For a moment I stand in the empty shopping arcade, staring in disbelief and unable to move.
The spiders begin to twitch their heads towards me, and then – like a miniature orange rocket – the General is shooting up out of their scrum and towards me, yelling fit to burst. *What on earth are you waiting for, boy? RUN!*
Somehow we find ourselves outside in the shopping plaza, although how I’m not sure. Everything that happens next seems to be in phases. At first I feel nothing, as dead inside as the empty shuttered shops around us.
The General is alive, but only just, a bedraggled version of his former self. That last flight has destroyed him. He lies flat in the palm of my hand, his antennae and wings limp, while the rain keeps falling around us till the whole tiled square is one shallow pool. Yet he hardly even stirs.
Perching on the upturned bench to try and keep the cockroach dry under my jacket, I shiver and wait, the stag and wolf watching me in silence – although I can sense waves of worry bouncing off them, which I try to ignore.
Still he doesn’t move.
The wolf and stag stay quiet, and suddenly I’m so angry with them. Why didn’t they stop the spiders? Why didn’t they try and help the General? Why didn’t they do more to warn me about the starling?
And still the rain falls and the thunder cracks. Who knows what Dagger and his Guardians could be doing at the Amsguard by now? Perhaps we are already too late.
The wolf sits at my feet, and for the first time ever lets me stroke him. It makes me feel better, but stroking isn’t going to magically make the cockroach better.
The General. The first creature I ever spoke to. He helped me escape when I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. He’s been by my side since then, or more usually on my shoulders, curled up in my scarf. I should have listened to him, not let him nearly die.
I think of all the cockroaches that have actually died before him. Thousands, millions – crushed, sprayed, poisoned without a second thought. Just cockroaches, everyone thought.
But this cockroach in my hand is my General.
The last of his kind, leader of a great army. There won’t be another.
Then suddenly I find myself choked up, and I can’t stop it – tears pouring out of me faster than the rain from the sky. *How many more?* I ask the stag, gulping through my sobs. *Rat, Squirrel, the General – how many more have to get hurt before this ends?*
He only shakes his head, as if to say, *I don’t know.*
I stand up, showering them with raindrops spraying off my anorak, feeling shaky all over. Like I’m no longer totally in control of what I say or do.
*I just don’t know if I can do this any more,* I say, looking at my trainers, water seeping into them. *People against animals. People against people. Animals against animals. The whole world – it’s so broken I can’t fix it. Just because I can talk to animals, why does that mean I have to fix it?*
A shadow falls over my face.
The wolf glances up at the stag, who has lifted his head to his full height, tall above us both. Through his horns I can see the corners of old blocks of flats, bent aerials and lightning flashing in the storm clouds behind. For a moment his eyes glaze over, like he is seeing something very far away.
*I swear,* I say. *I know you mean well, but if you try and tell me that I am a hero again, or any of that stuff – it isn’t going to work this time. Even you’ve got to see, Stag – this is way bigger than all that. The world is coming to an end, and there’s nothing you or I can do to stop it.*
*No, I’m not,* he says. *I’m not going to tell you any of that – what you call – stuff. In fact, I’m not going to say anything at all.*
And he doesn’t speak. He does something I have never heard him do on his own.
He begins to sing a call, alone, a call I have never heard before.
In a low, hoarse voice that keeps breaking –
Yet slowly, surely, the song begins to unfold around us in the grey and abandoned square, his words rising up into the muddle of my mind, as the sound drifts off over the top of the crumbling buildings and into the sky.
Words I know I will never forget, that tell me the stag’s story for the first time.
A story that begins in a forest, in a drift of leaves underneath a gnarled tree. A young creature, sticky and newborn, wobbles to its feet. A baby deer, nuzzled and licked clean by his mother. He’s not alone; there is another shaky and sticky deer with him.
The young fawns learn to stand, and suckle milk from their mother. Then they are running and leaping in the forest, jumping over fallen trees, nudging and stroking one another.
Another figure arrives in the forest, all in b lack. A man, with a firestick. The mother and the sister of the deer tumble over, then the fawn is running as fast as he can, away from the forest.
He runs through streams and tunnels, over fences and walls. As he runs, he grows. Until he reaches some mountains, where other deer graze on the grassy slopes.
The deer is older now, velvety stumps beginning to poke out of his head. Hungry and exhausted, he is allowed to join the mountain herd. He roams the mountains with them, in mist, rain and sun.
As he grows older and stronger, he is challenged by other stags. They roar, lock horns and fight on the lower slopes – but he always wins. Until one day he stands in a circle of all the mountain deer, who bow their heads to him in the shadows of a setting sun.
Then the eyes of the other mountain deer start to turn red, and they fall down on the ground, all around the stag.
He escapes the plague and returns to the forest where he was born. And he calls the other animals he left behind there – other deer, badgers, squirrels, birds and butterflies – who follow him out past the mountain, to a lake at the end of the Island.
I think I know the rest.
He stops. I can barely speak. For a moment it seems the stag can’t either. *Can you guess what my mother’s last words to me were?* he says quietly. *Keep walking – that was all she said. My father I never knew. I’d lost my mother, my sister. But I had to keep walking. I walked until I found my herd on the mountains. And then, when the plague came, I walked again to the Ring of Trees. Then I walked with you to come here.* A great shiver runs from the tips of his horns to the end of his tail. *I know I will never see the mountains or the Ring of Trees again. I am too old to return now. But all I can do, all any creature can do, Wildness – is put one foot in front of another. We can keep walking.*
And as if he has been listening to the dream as well, the damp orange insect in the palm of my hand begins to stir, muttering something inaudible to himself. While the stag and the cub watch, I tuck him safely into my inside pocket, hidden from the storm. Then, frozen, soaking and tired, without another word, we turn away from the arcade back along the flooded river road and march forward together.
Back on the riverbank, the Ams seems to have grown wider, so now the towers opposite look smaller than they are, blurred and fuzzed by the streaks of rain. The river itself looks deeper too, muddy and swollen by the downpour, splashing through the railings where we walk along, trying to stay out of sight as we creep through the darkened city.
Part of me wishes Polly and Aida were with me now, but I know I have to face this on my own.
The wolf hurries ahead, sniffing every building corner for traces of his pack or the dog, then disappearing into the black rain ahead. We have no guide other than the direction the starling was headed in before she tricked us.
Every now and then we hear a shriek of bats in the sky, foxes barking in the distance or the gritty shower of insects swarming down a pipe. The chants and cries of the dark wild cover the city, spreading confusion and chaos.
Power cables swing uselessly down, their ends gnawed to pieces. I guide the stag away from their sparking ends, like monster snakes with an electric bite.
The ground is strewn with rubbish scattered from bins or dragged from smashed doors and windows.
Rats stream out of a parked car, paying little attention to us. Among them too I look for a face I recognize – with no luck.
I can’t see a single other person as they all hide out of sight, obeying Facto’s curfew, or waiting for the storm to pass and for the animals to leave.
The paved river paths shrivel way, like the trails of forest roots, into open country of empty motorways swooping past deserted dockyards.
The wind batters road signs hanging above our heads, as we march up one potholed tarmac hill and down another. The traffic lights are all dead, but that doesn’t matter because there’s no traffic any more.
Instead the roads are full of junk, hurled down the empty road by the gale –
Hazard cones, spinning single tyres and even a stop sign, bent and twisted, come blowing our way, forcing the stag and me to stand aside and let them pass. The wolf-cub dodges between them, trotting along as if nothing was happening, his snout bent low to the ground, determined to find a scent.
The stag and I huddle behind the shattered glass of a bus shelter and watch the lumps of plastic and metal bump past us – as if for a moment they too had come to life, to destroy the city that created them – before being swept over the curve of a safety barrier on to the roofs of warehouses beneath the highway.
The stag says, *You have made this earth unrecognizable.*
*But it is still our home.*
*One worth saving.* I can’t tell whether he means it as a question or a command.
I wait for the General to make a biting remark, but he doesn’t because he’s only barely alive. I look again at the jumble of man-made browns and greys and artificial whites stretching out before us. They blur before my eyes. And in my mind I’m not seeing them. I’m seeing the pale faces of Dad, of Polly, and Aida, fleeing from their prison in the Four Towers –
But before I can reply, the cub is hurtling back towards us out of the dark, his eyes shining through the wet. *Listen!*
I listen, but all I can hear is the wind and the rain, the explosions and animal cries –
*Not those sounds, Wildness. Listen again.*
I strain, cupping my ears with my hands. The stag is stock still, not moving a muscle.
And then I begin to hear it.
So faintly, floating out across the city – the animal call any human can hear.
That any wolf can hear from a very great distance. The howl of another.
*It is my mother,* he declares. *We can find them now. My mother and her pack were here. This is the trail.*
The cub leads us down one last dip of abandoned motorway and off on to a muddy side road, past a sign.
FACTO CONSTRUCTION ZONE UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY FORBIDDEN
Beyond a security pole swinging loose in the wind, a sentry cabin, with smashed windows. There is no sign of the Facto guards who must have been in it, but I can guess – if Dagger and his New Guardians were here – what has happened to them.
I push the barrier open and we stumble along ridges of mud made by heavy lorries, which now run deep with water, but that doesn’t stop the wolf-cub finding paw-prints that I would never have seen.
The track only seems to get deeper and muddier. The river beyond the barbed-wire fence is rising. The mud is covering and coating our feet so the stag and wolf are more clay than fur, as we force our way on past the wind that tears into us along canyons between scaffolding piles and stacks of metal containers.
*I feel like an insect among these metal rocks,* says the wolf-cub.
I don’t want to think about insects. Despite the mud forming around my shoe, the rain beating into our faces, all I want to think about are those we left behind in the Four Towers. If I turn around, I can just see the red lights twinkling in the murk.
Then, just when I’m not sure I will be able to take another step, we emerge on to a concrete plain.
We stop dead in our tracks, facing the river.
I guessed right.
There they are, shining in the first glimmers of morning light.
Nine colossal stone towers, rising out of the surging waves like mountains, spanning the whole width of the Ams. The concrete mountains are connected by white metal gates the height of whole houses, that scoop down into the water. Flood barriers with hydraulic hinges the size of oil pipes, suspension-bridge cables holding them tight.
Nine stone trees. The Amsguard.
The man-made structure standing between us and the rising seas of the world. The river laps hungrily at this side of the gates, while spray is already washing over the tops of the gantries from the other side.
It is not yet, however, strong enough to wash away the silhouetted line of figures dotted across the central tower.
The unmistakable ears and tails of a pack of wolves –
And, standing on his hind legs, almost more human than beast, leaning against the railings, facing away from us out to sea –
A white dog.
Standing in the deserted building site at the base of the Amsguard, I look around for a way up to the dog and the wolves parading along the top. It’s night-time now and the moonless sky doesn’t shed much light on the situation.
I can see a lift shaft dead ahead, the gates chained and padlocked. Bundles of razor wire cover the fences between here and the shore – and besides, even if I could get over, even if I was crazy enough to try and swim in the freezing, frothing water – the first tower is too far out to reach.
But it is connected to the unfinished concrete floor we stand on by a tree-sized cable, punched with rivets, raindrops rolling off the fresh white paint. Raindrops and – just very faintly – the smeared splodges of muddy paw-prints.
While I study the cable, the stag comes up behind me, sniffing it suspiciously. *Even if I could,* he says, *I am too old for such adventures now.*
I stroke his damp flank softly and notice for the first time that there are grey hairs around his muzzle. *No,* I say, shivering like crazy, *but you are not too old to wait here, and if I am not back by dawn – you must return to the Four Towers, and somehow – find Dad …*
*What do you mean, if I am not back?* says the wolf-cub. *You are not planning to climb this fallen white tree alone, are you, Wildness?*
I look at the slippery cable stretching away and up to the nearest gantry, suspended high in the air above first rock-hard concrete and then thrashing river. Then I look back at the wolf-cub.
*I’m not sure I could climb that, Cub.*
*It is just like walking across a fallen tree in a ravine at which I am the …* He falters and corrects his voice. *Which is nothing for a near-grown wolf like me.*
*Would you like to put that to the test, cubling?* says a gruff voice. The hooded fox steps out from the shadows of the lift shaft, his ruff beaded with rain, but no less thick and handsome than before.
The wolf’s tail is straight up, tip pointed, and he is completely silent. Which he always is at his most dangerous.
*Hee-hee! Looks like you upset him!* says another fox voice, its owner dropping lightly on to the ground behind us from the top of a steel container. Eyes Wide looks even madder than before, the fur on his head stirred up by the wind into a crazy quiff.
*What they said,* adds Skulker, detaching himself from one of the sheaves of rusting wire and slouching towards the stag, who grunts and lowers his horns.
*Foxes,* I say, *you know the dream as well as all creatures. Whatever that dog is planning, if he goes ahead, it will be the end of us all.*
*The end of us all!* echoes Skulker.
*We’re all going to die!* shrieks Eyes Wide with delight.
*These are just more of your human lies,* says Hooded stiffly. *But even if that is the case, all the more reason to take our revenge first.*
*You had your chance in the cave –* I begin, but he pushes me aside with a wave of his bushy tail.
*Not you,* he sighs. *I mean this excuse for an animal.*
He squares up to the wolf-cub. *Your mother and her pack took our positions as Guardi
ans,* he spits. *Now we are left behind to guard against children such as yourselves, while the heroes’ honour is claimed by them.*
*That is nothing to do with him, Fox.* I say. *Why not join us against those who took your place?*
He rounds on me, eyes blazing, his black lips pulled right back over his jaws as he flashes his teeth.
*Of course! How the humans respond to everything – Not my fault, it’s his fault, it’s their fault.* Hooded looks around at the plain of concrete and steel, the swirling clouds and the foaming river. *Well, look where we are. Is all this no one’s fault? Someone made our world like this, and, forgive me, but I don’t think it was us.*
*Yeah! You lot! I mean, you really … you know … I think you’re … doing all that stuff and things,* says Skulker. There’s an awkward pause while we all try not to look at him. *I mean … what he said basically,* he finishes lamely.
Hooded ignores him.
*All humans must pay the price for the actions of their brothers and sisters. Starting with you and your treacherous allies.*
The three foxes circle the cub hungrily, as the animals try to out-growl and out-snarl one another. The stag told me once that animals prefer to scare another beast off with sounds and threats, that they prefer not to fight unless they absolutely have to. I can only hope he’s right.
Wolf-Cub glances at me in surprise. *Why are you still here? Go!*
I feel he is suddenly at the end of a long tunnel, falling away from me. *No, Wolf-Cub, please. Not you as well.*
Eyes Wide springs at him, but the cub bats him away. The crazed fox picks himself up, unbothered, as Skulker starts to pull and tug at the wolf’s tail. Hooded is doing a dance with the stag’s horns, but the stag is not as fast as he once was.
*Go!* he too says to me, not taking his eyes off the ruffed fox. *Have faith in us.*
He doesn’t add *for once*, but he could have.
*The only thing that human should have faith in is his own destruction, which will be all the quicker if he makes it as far as those wolves,* says Hooded.